Kinsler: When that roll is called up yonder I’ll be here, I guess

Poor Natalie has had a very tough winter. She herself has suffered only two mild cases of the sniffles, but everyone around her is dropping off like it’s the Day of Rapture. Two of our closest friends have been hospitalized with life-threatening diseases, and there have been some deaths.

But despite the prime directive of the Warrior Princess, which is that nobody shall know her feelings, I knew perfectly well that something else was wrong, and she was not at all happy that I knew it. And gradually, through the enhanced interrogation techniques that every married couple develops over the course of decades, the truth has come out: she’s worried about me.

“You,” she emphasized, pointing at me, “have been sick since before Christmas, and I still don’t know if something permanent is wrong with you.”

“I thought it was long established that there’s something permanently wrong with me. My sister always said so.” I replied.

“You know what I mean,” came the response. “I’m not equipped to have you dead or disabled.”

And so I’ve been ordered to get with the program and certify to the Court that I’m in blooming good health. “I have been bereft,” she said, closing the conversation.

Oh. Well, I didn’t think I’d been all that sick unless you count my celebrated stunt of getting the flu and a kidney stone attack simultaneously, and will readily admit that for the last several weeks I’ve felt like a reject from the Valley of the Lepers. But I hardly think I’m ready to saddle up for the last roundup just yet.

For one thing, I am male, which means that I have a fundamental belief in my own immortality. All of us do, for if I survived several bicycle wrecks at age ten it stands to reason that I’ll survive everything else.

“You are 70,” she reminded me. “You’ve run right through your warranty period, but I still want you around.”

I suppose that’s sufficient motivation in itself and besides, someone has to make Natalie laugh each day. Tomorrow I shall resume my daily walk.

Mark Kinsler, kinsler33@gmail.com, is a science teacher from Cleveland Heights who clings to life in an old house in Lancaster with Natalie and the four cats, who likely don’t care.